Thursday, December 31, 2015

A new year's gift to you all, through the kindness of Chris Morley: Chris has told me that Disqus has the ability to permit comments to include photos, sound, and videos. I think I have just now turned on that feature.

When you open a comment box, you should now see below it (to the left) a little icon you may click to add those forms of media to your comment, if you wish. I'm adding this feature since John Bijarney mentioned recently how useful it would be, and Chris seconded the suggestion, and then very helpfully told me that Disqus does have this feature, and all I needed to do is turn it on.

It's that time of year — Coughie time! I have come to look forward to Frank Cocozzelli's annual announcement of his Coughlin Award, given to the U.S. Catholic who has, well, here's Frank's explanation of what the Coughie is all about:

Tuesday, December 29, 2015

As of 3:30 P.M. CST in North America, National Catholic Reporter's editorial naming Greg Bourke and Michael DeLeon has garnered 310 comments. In typical fashion when any U.S. Catholic publication publishes an editorial calling for less Catholic cruelty to LGBT people, the editorial is now picking up the comments of the attack squads who monitor Catholic blog sites for such articles, and then inundate them with hateful comments.

A footnote to what I posted yesterday about the editorial announcement of National Catholic Reporter that it has chosen as its 2015 persons of the year the Catholic couple Greg Bourke and Michael DeLeon, lead plaintiffs in the Obergefell case: I subscribe to the more-or-less daily email newsletter of the Come to Terms Project. Come to Terms sends out an emailed newsletter entitled SCOTUS Daily. To my knowledge, issues of this emailed newsletter are not archives online (but if you're interested, it's very easy to go to the link I've just provided, click on it, and add yourself to the email list by clicking on "Supporters" and then following the instructions given there.

There's a beautiful Christmas sermon wrapped up in Tim Cunningham's narrative about why the U.S. and other affluent countries never had an Ebola epidemic (hint: it's about people working together across religious, ideological, ethnic boundary lines; it's about the amazing courage of some people willing to risk their lives to save the lives of other people). Tim, who's a pediatric emergency nurse in New York, and who went to Sierra Leone last year to combat the Ebola epidemic, writes,

Tuesday, December 22, 2015

Today, the Catholic Committee of Appalachia released its "People's Pastoral" (pdf file) entitled "The Telling Takes Us Home; Taking Our Place in the Stories that Shape Us." The pastoral document is being released on the 40th anniversary of the 1975 pastoral letter "This Land Is Home to Me." I'm grateful to my friend-colleague Michael J. Iafrate, who chaired the board of the committee producing the pastoral, and who sent me the press release the committee sent out as it released the pastoral statement. Jeanne Kirkhope was coordinator of the pastoral-writing process.

An early Christmas gift: Alan McCornick's smart, wonderfully dense (think an outstanding slice of dark, rich fruitcake), fetchingly written essay about religion as the problem at his Hepzibah site yesterday. Precisely because Alan's essay is dense and so well-written, it's hard for me to select a passage to try to tempt you to read it in its entirety. Here's one that does leap out at me, since it so well summarizes the primary point Alan is making in the essay — that religion is the problem when adherents of a particular religion (and the culture at large) permit any given religion to rest easy with the reduction of its complex message to something like the obligation to kill one's perceived enemies: Alan writes,

Monday, December 21, 2015

As Steve Benen notes, the video at the head of the posting, in which two young men in the Netherlands read verses from a Bible disguised as the Quran to people on the street, and then ask for their reaction, has gone viral. Steve Benen writes,

As we approach the solstice, the day of the year with least light, a report to you from on the ground in the deep, dark heart of the bible belt, where hysteria about people of a religious persuasion different than our owns appears to be reaching fever pitch as Christmas arrives:

Saturday, December 19, 2015

As wild hair reports in a comment here this morning, New Ways Ministry's Bondings 2.0 blog has now published a statement about Belmont Abbey College's request to receive Title IX funds while discriminating against transgender folks. Writing for Bondings, Bob Shine notes that Belmont Abbey has attracted the negative attention of various LGBT groups that combat discrimination against LGBT people.

Friday, December 18, 2015

And another quote to share with you this evening (well, it's evening in my neck of the woods): as many of you may now have read, Kathryn Knott, one of those charged in the Philadelphia gay-bashing incident in which two gay men were assaulted by folks leaving a restaurant gathering of graduates of a local Catholic high school in September 2014, has been found guilty of assault. Here's John Kopp reporting on the verdict at Philly Voice:

And so yesterday as I was blogging about the choice of a Catholic school on the far-right fringes of U.S. political life and of the Catholic academy to obtain permission to discriminate against a minority group while receiving federal funds, what news should break but this news? As Bob Shine notes at Bondings 2.0, in Massachusetts, Judge Douglas H. Wilkins handed down a ruling (pdf file) that a Catholic school in that state, Fontbonne Academy, violated state non-discrimination laws when it rescinded a contract offered to Matthew Barrett after learning that Barrett was gay and married — to Ed Suplee.

Thursday, December 17, 2015

I have shared with you the story of how a Catholic college in North Carolina owned by a Benedictine community destroyed my career as a Catholic theologian and that of my now husband Steve in the early 1990s, though we were abiding by the unwritten rules of the Catholic academy that required us to be closeted and to keep our relationship hidden as we taught at this college. In a series of postings here this past October (here, here, here, here, here, and here), I shared with you a detailed document I compiled and circulated in October 1993 recounting the story of what Belmont Abbey College and monastery did to end my career as a Catholic theologian.

Tuesday, December 15, 2015

If you're looking for a rather neat snapshot of the two theological universes that coexist uneasily in American Catholicism today, especially vis-a-vis the question of welcomingly openly gay people and married gay couples in Catholic parishes, I'd highly recommend Patricia Montemurri's report in Detroit Free Press today about Bryan Victor and Thomas Molina-Duarte, a gay couple who married this summer in an Episcopal church in Detroit, but who are active members of a Catholic church in Detroit. Montemurri indicates that Victor's uncle Rev. Ronald Victor, a Catholic priest, attended his wedding along with other family members, and supports the couple, noting that the Catholic community "needs more examples of gay holiness."

Until yesterday, the story of what's happening with Father Peter Miqueli and former USCCB president Cardinal Timothy Dolan in the New York archdiocese seemed largely confined to the tabloid news, and for that reason, I haven't commented on it. I'm averse to wading through tabloid slime, I'm far from confident that what the tabloids report is accurately reported, and stories they break have a nasty way of twisting and turning, leaving folks who comment precipitously on them embarrassed at having trusted a tabloid report.

Steve and I went yesterday to a local Episcopal church again, as we observed the third Sunday of Advent. Friends have repeatedly invited us to this church, too — one who's a recovering Southern Baptist, another who's the son of a United Methodist minister. One female, the other male; one straight, the other gay; one a former student of mine in a graduate ministry program, the other a longtime friend.

Sunday, December 13, 2015

I'm grateful to Derrick De Lise for publishing an interview with me at his Inexorable Pilgrim site yesterday. Derrick entitles his interview "Courageous Conversation with Bill Lindsey," and notes that the subject of our conversation (via email) was the challenge to be both openly gay and a person of faith.

Friday, December 11, 2015

I very much appreciate that Chris Morley recommended to us Jesuit Father Frank Brennan's recent article at Eureka Street noting the futility of the battle of some church leaders, the Catholic bishops of Australia included, against same-sex marriage in Australia. As Father Brennan rightly notes, there are compelling reasons — moral ones — for recognizing the right of same-sex couples to civil marriage. These include the protection of children such couples may be raising, the state's interest in supporting couples committed to each other who provide care for each other as they age, and the undercutting of homophobia, which, as he notes, has toxic social consequences.

Here's a set of interlocking observations that, to my mind, share a common theme: 1) a comment an Episcopal priest made to me yesterday about why some streams of Christianity are so adamant today in their opposition to LGBT rights; 2) Diarmaid MacCulloch on the same topic and how it's all about shoring up the supremacy of heterosexual males; 3) David Marr's commentary on why the Australian Catholic bishops are bitterly opposed to legalization of same-sex marriage; and 4) Fred Clark's account of the baffling determination of some U.S. white evangelicals to continue, generation after generation, choosing the wrong side of the moral arc of history in battles for human rights:

Wednesday, December 9, 2015

Another Advent offering for you today from a log of quotations I've kept over the years as I've read: as with yesterday's set of illuminations, all of these feature a certain word about which I propose that we think with concentration these days, whether we're meditating as members of a religious tradition or are not connected to or hostile to religion:

An Advent offering for you, continuing the themes of the meditation I posted yesterday: illuminations from many different books and poems I've read over many years, and have recorded in my quotation log:

Monday, December 7, 2015

It's that time of year in which the waning of the light really does put us into a new — a different — space emotionally and spiritually. We wake these days to bleak darkness, and long before bedtime, the sun has vanished below the horizon. During the day, it comes into the house at new, and sometimes challenging, angles as it moves itself to the southern side of the sky.

I am not by any means the only person giving testimony about how Pope Francis's silence regarding the threat to LGBT lives in Africa radically undermines his "reform" agenda for the Catholic church. Today's New York Times carries an essay by papal biographer Paul Vallely entitled "The Pope's Failure in Africa." Vallely's testimony is critically important because he has been a strong defender of Francis and a promoter of his reform agenda.

Yesterday was World AIDS Day. What was the official, unambiguous statement of good news offered by the leaders of the Catholic church to the world on World AIDS Day, regarding an illness that remains epidemic and lethal in particular in the continent of Africa?

Tuesday, December 1, 2015

As Ken Briggs notes today in National Catholic Reporter, the "no big deal" approach Pope Francis appears to take to some issues causes him to hard-sell some topics (e.g., the need to respond to climate change), while soft-pedaling or bypassing others. The latter category includes, Briggs suggests, how the Catholic church should respond to LGBT people and to the use of condoms to combat the spread of HIV.

"We need, in every community, a group of angelic troublemakers." Bayard Rustin, Quaker gay activist

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About Me

I'm a theologian who writes about the interplay of belief and culture. My husband Steve (also a theologian) and I are now in our 47th year together. Though the church has discarded us (and here, here, here, and here) because we insist on being truthful about our shared life, we continue to celebrate the amazing grace we find in our journey together and love for each other.
We live in hope; we remain on pilgrimage....
A note about my educational background: I have a Ph.D. and M.A. in theology from Univ. of St. Michael's College, Toronto School of Theology; an M.A. in English from Tulane Univ.; and a B.A. in English from Loyola, New Orleans.